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Wednesday, September 24, 2008

Community Carnival Food Stands - Fundraiser or Pissing Contest?

To begin, I been involved in hundreds of foodstand fund raisers. But there's one event that stands above it all.

The Tustin Tiller Days Carnival stands tall above the others. It happens in October every year.

This one has a reputation system that places organizations having the best type or fanciest looking BBQ systems on top of the others. Basically its become a more of a pissing contest among the organizations than a fundraising event.

Mine is a respectable model noted for it's efficiency , safety, and ease of use. Thanks to a donation last week by one of our long time sponsors to replace the one that got stolen. We got a brand new char-broil.com BBQ. This event marks the first ever 100% fully sponsored foodstand event. We were hit up with hundreds of dollars in purchasing cards from a dozen supermarkets and wholesalers. Our office manager Rex gets the credit for making it a complete success on the preparation.

So Saturday afternoon comes then 'judgment period' when people walk in the back areas and gawk at the new and fancy BBQs out there. And some are wealthy guys and they're compassionate and sometimes make donations if they like your BBQ arrangement. We were hit up 4 yrs ago with a nice $250 donation cause of it. We were treated with extra hands in teardown. And a guaranteed invite back in the following year.

Keep our fingers crossed at the Tustin Tiller Days event for a good fundraise and we have lots of hearing impaired help here. We've always brought back thousands of dollars each time.

Based on the excellent preparation results so far, I feel I'm a winner in the 'pissing contest' not because of my new BBQ, because I was able to get this event fully funded by corporations this year.